Page 44 of Let Me Be Your Hero
“I just sold my first book to The Minerva Press,” Izzie continued. “They’ve offered me a five-book contract. If there’s any hope of me becoming one of their regular writers, I mustshow them that I’m reliable. I must turn my next book in on time. And if I should conceive right now, there’s no way I’ll be able to balance writing with motherhood.”
“Wait.” Archibald blinked, confused. “That’s the reason? Because you don’t want to get pregnant?”
“That’s right.” Izzie dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “I feel like, once I’ve completed this contract, once they’ve come to know me, perhaps they would be a bit more flexible. But the timing is just wretched.”
Archibald peered at her, sure his ears were deceiving him. “Is that the only reason you don’t want to marry me?”
“Yes, that’s the only reason. And I wish you wouldn’t phrase it that way. Idowant to marry you. I know things have happened quickly, but I’m not unhappy about it. It almost feels like… like fate,” she said, looking down at her hands.
His heart couldn’t help but thrum, hearing her say those words. He knew she would take them all back as soon as she learned the first thing about him. He wasn’t so lucky as to be destined for a life with Isabella Astley, however much he longed for it.
But an idea was forming in his head. Maybe he could salvage this after all.
“Do you want to have children?” he asked.
“I do,” she said swiftly, then bit her lip. “But…”
“But?” he asked gently.
“But my mother boreeightchildren,” she said in a rush. “Even with a flock of nursemaids, it left her little time to do anything else. And women talk, you know. Carrying baby after baby, year after year, takes a heavy toll on your body.”
“In an ideal world, how many would you like to have?” Archibald asked.
She screwed up her face. “I don’t know. Maybe… two?”
Archibald nodded. He did want to have children of his own.
But he found he didn’t particularly care about the number. Two sounded… fine.
And he could understand Izzie’s logic. As much as he wanted to marry her, he would be devastated if doing so meant he had to give up his work as an engineer. It was only logical that she would feel the same way about her writing. And, given that she was the one who would have to carry and bear any children they did have, it struck him that there was much more at stake for her than for him, and perhaps she should have some say on how many children they ultimately had.
He took her hand in his. “I have a proposal for you. What if we were to take precautionary measures?”
Izzie blinked up at Archibald, certain she had misheard.
“Precautionary measures?” she asked, unsure.
“Precautionary measures,” he said firmly. “There are things we could do that would dramatically reduce the chances of conception. I could use something called a sheath, for example.”
Archibald had misunderstood—Izzie knew what a sheath was, and she was familiar with a variety of precautionary measures. She’d spent most of her life listening with eager ears for any information she could ferret out about intimate relations. In particular, when she first got her courses, her sister Caro’s lady’s maid, Fanny, had explained that there was a way to count the days around her menses and how to figure out which days she would be most likely to conceive.
So, it wasn’t that Izzie needed an explanation of what precautionary measures were. She’d asked her question because she couldn’t believe Archibald was willing to consider them.
Most men considered the number of children they had to be a mark of their virility. Izzie had a distinct memory from when she was around twelve of listening at the door to the morning room with Lucy while her mother’s friends gossiped about how Lord Such-and-Such ought to leave his poor wife alone. She had borne him ten babes in twelve years, they had noted, and it wasn’t as if he didn’t have a mistress to satisfy his urges. Yet there was his wife, expecting again.
It was also accepted as fact that the purpose of lovemaking was procreation, and any attempt to subvert procreation was sacrilegious. What Archibald had suggested was beyond scandalous.
Not that Izzie was offended by his suggestion.Scandalouswas practically her middle name.
And if he was willing to do this, maybe…
Maybe they could still wed.
Hope flared in her heart, a fragile thing with butterfly wings. Because she hadn’t been lying when she said that she wanted to marry Archibald. She didn’t know him as well as she’d like, but everything she did know about him seemed wonderful.
She felt more convinced than ever that marrying this man was not a mistake.
“I won’t lie to you,” Archibald continued. “The precautions to which I refer are not foolproof. There is a chance that they could fail and that you could find yourself with child before you’re ready. That, even if we agree to try for two children, we could wind up with three, or even four. The only guarantee is abstinence, and”—he laughed darkly—“given what happened yesterday afternoon, I do not think it realistic to imagine that we could live under the same roof and keep our hands off one another. But were we to take these precautions, I think we could do fairly well. I certainly don’t think we would wind up with eight children.”
